Some people love testing — and with good reason. Poking around and figuring out how to break stuff can be a lot of fun. However, some people take SET/SDET roles as a way into a company, and hope to move to being a plain ol’ software developer shortly thereafter. In many cases, these people find [...]
If there are two programmers who are equally good, but one knows Java and the other knows C++, Google would hire both. Really. But, does Google prefer, on the margin, C++ over Java? Not really. Java is actually easier in some ways in that you won’t have to worry about memory management and pointers in [...]
You know that awkward moment when you get to the end of an interview, your interviewer asks if you have any questions, and you just… don’t? Sure, you should have questions. You know that. But, for now, you just got through being grilled for 45 minutes and you really have little you want to know [...]
In a standard technical interview process, you’re do between one and three phone interviews and then come in for a full day of four to five technical interviews. Then, the company makes its decision and you’re on your way (or not). Sometimes though, the company calls you back with some slightly frustrating news: they want [...]
Although I have, quite literally, made a career in the technical interviewing space, I have mixed feelings on them. They offer a lot of value and most people’s issues with them (“trick questions!” “no relationship to real world coding!” “in the real world you’d just look up stuff like this!”) are easily refuted. However, they’re [...]
Somewhere in the midst of discussions about things like “tailoring your resume to the position,” one of the best pieces of resume advice gets lost: Your resume needs to be accomplishment-oriented. Many resumes that I see do precisely the opposite. They offer bullets like: Contributed to design documents on ________ feature and helped coordinate international [...]
In an ideal world, I’d respond to all the questions I get from people asking for advice. I like helping people; this is why I do what I do! In the real, time-limited world, I can only respond to about 25% of the questions I get from people. If your goal is to get a [...]
An article by Amanda Blum portrays Adria Richards, who has been subjected to the wrath of the internet, in a pretty damning light. Amanda describes Adria as “a bully who uses these instances to her personal gain, driving traffic to her blog.” She cites two interactions with Adria which, admittedly, look pretty bad. Adria comes [...]
No one should have been fired. Now can we all just calm down? Backstory: At PyCon, a python developers conference which purports to have a relatively large percentage of women (only 20% still), two guys made some jokes to each other laced with sexual innuendos (something about the word “dongle”). Adria Richards, a Developer Evangelist, was bothered by [...]
Marissa Mayer’s decision to terminate telecommuting arrangements for Yahoo! employees has ignited a frenzy of negative press. Articles cite how studies have shown that telecommuting arrangements lead to more happier and productive employees. How could Mayer have been so stupid and shortsighted? Surely, this signals the downfall of Yahoo. Interestingly, when I hear reports from people who [...]